Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Ben Gurion Airport
Summary
Ben Gurion International Airport , commonly known by the Hebrew-language acronym Natbag (), is the main international airport of Israel. Situated on the northern outskirts of the city of Lod, it is the busiest airport in the country. It is located to the northwest of Jerusalem and to the southeast of Tel Aviv. Until 1973, it was known as Lod Airport, whereafter it was renamed in honour of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), the first Israeli prime minister. The airport serves as a hub for El Al, Israir Airlines, Arkia, and Sun d'Or, and is managed by the Israel Airports Authority.
In 2019, Ben Gurion Airport handled 24.8 million passengers. It is considered to be among the five best airports in the Middle East due to its passenger experience and its high level of security; while it has been the target of several terrorist attacks, no attempt to hijack a plane departing from Ben Gurion Airport has ever succeeded.
The airport holds extreme strategic importance to Israel as it is one of the few convenient entry points into the country for most travellers. As Ben Gurion Airport once held standalone significance, it was regarded as a single point of failure, which led to the opening of Ramon Airport in 2019.
The airport began during the British Mandate for Palestine as an airstrip of two unpaved runways on the outskirts of the town of Lydda (now Lod), near the Templer colony of Wilhelma. It was built in 1934, largely at the urging of Airwork Services. The first passenger service at the new airport was the Misr Airwork route Cairo—Lydda—Nicosia, inaugurated on 3 August 1935. Subsequently, Misr flew via Lydda to Haifa and Baghdad. The first continental European airline with a regular service to Lydda was LOT Polish Airlines since 4 April 1937. By that time, Lydda Airport boasted four fully operational concrete runways. Holland's KLM, which had since 1933 stopped at Gaza en route to Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), moved the service to Lydda in 1937. Imperial Airways, too, used Lydda as a refueling stop en route to India.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.